1. Field of the Invention
The present invention deals with a motion based remote control of a base station having a display. More specifically, it allows switching between a number of different control modes using a single trigger button located on said remote control.
2. Description of the Related Art
3D pointing devices (often also referred to as held “in the air”) which allow control of virtual zones on a display are known in the art. Such pointing devices normally include a number of sensors (for example, optical sensors, accelerometers, gyrometers, or magnetometers) capable of measuring the motion of the device in space and to convert the movement the user imparts to the pointing device into displacements of a cursor on the display. Pointing devices of this type have been disclosed, for instance, by U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/147,811 assigned to the same assignee as the present application. The pointing devices disclosed in this patent application include accelerometers and gyrometers, but other sensors are known in the art to perform the same functions.
Some of these devices also allow the user to enter commands by making gestures in the air with the remote control (like a number, a letter or a more complex input). Devices with this type of gesture recognition have been disclosed for instance in the U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/499,175 assigned to co-assignees, one of which is the assignee of the present application. The devices disclosed in this patent application use dynamic time warping algorithms to recognize the user's gestures, but other algorithms are also known in the art, like hidden Markov models.
Pointing devices may include a number of buttons or triggers to control functions of the base station or to switch between a pointing mode and a gesture recognition mode. It is for instance the case of the ones disclosed by U.S. Pat. No. 5,598,187. However, in this disclosure, the users have to use a number of different buttons whereas they have a need to use simple commands to switch, for example, between the pointing mode and the gesture recognition mode. The devices of the prior art have not solved this problem of intuitive and easy switching between different modes of the remote control, without using multiple buttons.